SportLine Solo 925 Heart Rate Monitor Review

While I knew they were sending me a heart rate monitor I didn’t know what colour it was, and of course I was tickled pink (excuse the pun) when it arrived and was a super pretty pink colour!

As a Polar F4 user, I was interested to see how this monitor compared to my beloved Polar. The SOLO doesn’t include a chest strap and required you to touch your finger tips to the metal area around the face in order to record your heart rate and this feature was what really drew me to the SOLO in the beginning.

I’ve come to find that wearing my Polar while teaching classes is a real pain. The chest strap always slips no matter what I do to it and it’s a bit awkward to be adjusting your chest strap during classes in front of a room full of people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked down at my Polar during a class only to see “Check Transmitter” and know that there was no way I could fix the problem because I was in the middle of teaching a song. This has led me to having a lot of inaccurate calorie burns and makes it difficult for me to monitor my heart rate during classes.

Enter the SOLO.

While some people may find having to touch your fingers to the watch in order to register your heart rate a pain, it doesn’t both me at all. I do find it registers most quickly if you are standing still so I tend to only take my heart rate between songs or on water breaks which works out really well. It doesn’t disturb my class and it gives me a good idea of how hard I’m working. Another thing I really like is I can wear the watch for all of my classes and if at the last minute I decide I want to record my heart rate or calorie burn I can, there is no chest strap to bother with, and no parts that I need to wet down prior to use (with the Polar you need to wet the chest strap in order for it to get a proper reading).

Something else that is really cool about the SOLO is that it can record your total calorie burn each day. If you remember to reset it when you get up or before you go to bed, and record your heart rate during exercise it will be able to tell you how many calories you’ve burned all day long. If you are trying to lose weight this information can be invaluable as it helps to take the guess work out of how many calories you should be consuming.

Honestly, the SOLO has a lot of functions that I still haven’t completely figured out. It has a pedometer which can calculate how many steps you’ve taken, how far you’ve travelled, it has a timer, an alarm clock, has a dual time feature if you travel frequently between time zones and even within the heart rate monitor functions there are lots of features I haven’t yet used.

As far as it’s accuracy, no heart rate monitor is going to be 100% accurate as far as calories burned is concerned, but will give you a much more accurate reading than exercise equipment. Compared to the Polar, I wore both monitors one night when I went for a 2 mile run and the total calories burned according to my Polar was 275, and the Sportline registered 248 so a difference of 27 calories. That makes sense to me since I had to stop running in order to get my heart rate to register on the SOLO and obviously as soon as I stopped moving my heart rate would start to slow.

Overall I think the SOLO is a wonderful tool – and is now my preferred tool for calculating calorie burn while teaching classes and for every day use. I think the strap and fit of the SOLO is much more comfortable than my Polar (which I find a bit big and clunky). However, when running I will still be using my Polar since I can see my heart rate without having to stop, and when I’m running it is easy for me to adjust the chest strap if it begins to slip.

If you are looking for an affordable option to help keep you motivated to move more I would urge you to take a look a the SOLO 925, besides being pretty it has a lot of wonderful (and practical) functions.

DISCLAIMER: I was sent the SOLO 925 free of charge in order to review it for Sportline, however all thoughts and opinions are 100% my own. Those aren’t for sale.

Stay tuned: Sportline also sent me an Ab Station which I’ll be reviewing in the coming weeks!

Comments

I just purchased the Solo 925 a couple of days ago but have yet to take it out of the package since I wasn’t 100% sold on if I made a good investment or not. I’ve scoured the internet for reviews, and yours happened to be the most detailed, so I think I’ll give it a shot!

I hope you like it! And if you figure out what that little number after your steps means in the pedometer setting, please let me know! I expect it’s telling me I’ve gone past my 10,000 steps goal for the day but I can’t figure out what the value of the little number is if that makes sense…

I got the 925 solo & I am trying to figure out how to program it for total calorie burn not just the walking. I do bootcamp & would like to get my total calories burnt but I am only getting what I walk. I have gone over the manual & it doesn’t really say so please any help would be great

Hi Jennifer, here is the response I emailed to Carla who asked a similar question. Hopefully it helps!

“I’m assuming that you have entered your resting heart rate, weight, age and all that information into the watch to begin with and will go from there.

When you want to record your calories burned you hit the bottom left button once to get to the pedometer setting then the bottom right button once to get to the calories burned section. (I think you already know this part but I’m going to go step by step as it’s easier for me that way)

Next you press and hold the bottom right button until the clock/calorie count goes to zero. At this point, it will calculate your calories burned based on your entered resting heart rate. To get your actual calories burned during a workout, you have to stop from time to time and place your two fingers on the top or bottom metal section of the watch directly above or below the screen and hold them there until the watch beeps letting you know it had recorded your heart rate. I find that it does this the most quickly if you stop moving completely for a few seconds (10 at the most). I normally do it between songs in my classes or just before grabbing a drink of water. You’ll need to do that every 10 minutes or so to update the internal computer so it can continue to calculate your calorie burn. If you do that, by the end of the class you should have a fairly accurate reading of your calories burned.

A wrist watch heart rate monitor such as this, is more of a pain to use than say a Polar with a chest strap because you do have to stop and touch the metal section now and again to get updated info on your heart rate, whereas a heart rate monitor with a chest strap update the internal computer with data from the chest strap automatically. I have both versions, and find when used properly that the solo heart rate monitor is almost always within 20-30 calories of the polar so I think it’s pretty accurate.

Now, if you want to get your TOTAL calories burned in a day, you would do the same thing, except you would let the watch continue to run (and continue to update your heart rate anytime you think it’s gone up or down) for a 24 hours period. You can switch back to the regular time screen if you like, you don’t need to stay on the calories burned screen the entire time, and when not exercising I typically take my pulse (through the watch) once every couple hours just to keep it with the most accurate info.”

Hi!
I recently purchased a sportline watch and I love it! I do high-intensity Zumba classes, taking my heart rate after pretty much every song, and the watch usually records that I burn between 900-1000 calories per class!! I am just curious about the accuracy and wondering what your thoughts are. It seems like taking heart rate periodically–aka right after I finish a song, would contribute to inaccuracy–for example, say we do a high intensity song and I record my heart rate right after…and then we do a lower-intensity song, and my heart rate drops. Would the watch be calculating based on the assumption that my heart rate is staying at the last recorded rate? If so, I think it probably over-estimates my calories burned…but I noticed that your solo actually recorded less than the polar watch. Like you said, it can never really be 100% accurate, but I was just wondering if you could shed some light on that!

I’m certainly no expert on the matter, but if you are careful to take your heart rate after every (no most) songs, it should even out in the end. Yes, if you take your heart rate at the end of an intense song I believe it goes with the assumption hat you are still working that hard, however if the next song is a lower intensity one and you take your heart rate at the end of that it will re adjust to that heart rate for the next song, which is likely a bit higher intensity, and so on. So it’s certainly not going to be 100% accurate, and since song lengths do vary but are generally in the 3-4:30 minute range it *should* work out to be fairly close in the end. Obviously I don’t know your height, weight, or what your version of “high intensity” looks like so I can’t say for sure that 900-1000 calories/class seems right or wrong, but depending on those items (height/weight/intensity level) it could be pretty accurate.

Honestly, even a polar with a chest strap isn’t 100% accurate, they all use equations to base how many calories are burned and there are internal variances that can make two seemingly identical people (height/weight/intensity level) have very different actual calorie expenditures during exercise.

If I were you I’d use it as a gauge (which is all they are meant to be anyway) and assume that it is pretty accurate until you know otherwise, but still remember that it could be totally whack 😉

I don’t know if that really helped at all…

Meet Suzi Fevens:

Suzi is a self employed fitness instructor & blogger living in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her life revolves around yoga, tea, cats, lattes, her family, reading, cupcakes & Doctor Who (not necessarily in that order!)
suzi@confessionsofafitnessinstructor.com